If you read my blog regularly, you'll know that I spent Saturday morning in a local cemetery, not for a funeral, or because anyone I know is buried there, but simply because I'd long felt the pull to visit. It turned out to be an invitation from Jesus to find healing for a long-wounded place in my heart. I woke far earlier than I'd planned on Saturday morning, having been looking forward to a long, lazy morning in bed. Instead, I found myself wide awake, but with little motivation to move from the warm cocoon of my bed. I grabbed my laptop from the dresser beside my bed, and turned it on, intending a quick check of my email, and then popping in a dvd and (hopefully) falling back asleep as it played.
Instead, while I was perusing my emails a friend on the other side of the country instant messaged me, and we began chatting. We talked about our various plans for the day, and I happened to mention that I was feeling a strong urge to visit this particular cemetery. (She been visiting a few weeks before, and I'd pointed it out to her.) She suggested that perhaps I was feeling the urge to spend time in a cemetery because some things in my life have been dying of late. Her comment brought to mind a situation from nearly ten years ago, and before I knew it I was sharing a story with her that I'd never before told anyone. Her response had many helpful thoughts in it, but what stood out in my mind was a succinct comment "And you wonder why you want to go to a cemetery?" It made me laugh and convinced me that that was, indeed, how I was going to spend my day.
Just over eight years ago my grandfather passed away. Our relationship was not a particularly close one due to many things, though he'd been a constant presence in my life since birth. He was from a generation of men that rarely if ever expressed emotion. He loved to tease, and during my teenage years I had a love-hate relationship with this man who drew seemingly great pleasure from making sometimes rude comments about my love for food, and my weight. When you are a woman with curves in a family of women who are rather slender, you can't help but feeling self-conscious, and Grandpa's comments did little to alleviate my teenage (and onwards) angst.
His illness was long, and drawn out. Congestive heart failure they called it. Over the last years of his life he was in and out of hospital, and there was even talk of him and my grandma moving into the home of my family (my dad is their oldest child) because the care required was becoming more than grandma could handle alone, while not enough to necessitate nursing care.
I remember that last week of his life in ways that are both vividly clear and completely blurry. It was becoming obvious that he would not be leaving the hospital this time around, and family members were beginning to stay nights at the hospital, taking turns, never leaving him alone. I'd visited the hospital with my parents and brothers several times that week, each time knowing that it could be the last.
On the Friday of that week, I came home from high school exhausted – completely spent, physically and emotionally. My mom and brothers were once again heading to the hospital, and though I felt guilty, I made a decision based in self-care, and chose to stay at home and rest, planning to visit the following day. It was a decision that I would regret deeply for the next eight years.
When I rose fairly early the next morning, and stumbled out into the living room, collapsing on the couch, I was greeted by my dad. No softening, just "Grandpa died last night. Your aunt and I went to the hospital when Grandma called, to say our goodbyes. We need to head for Grandma's house soon."
All I could think in the shock of that moment was that I'd put myself first in a moment of exhaustion the day before, and now I'd never get the chance to say goodbye.
As time wore on, the guilt of that decision weighed heavy. I knew it was irrational, and I never mentioned it to anyone, but I was unable to escape it, either, and it came up at the oddest of times.
I hadn't thought about any of this in months, but found the story spilling out of me in that brief conversation with my friend early on Saturday morning. Her words hit home, "You can say goodbye now. He can say goodbye too." I questioned her further, "He can say goodbye?" She reminded me that the Catholic church, which both of us have been exploring of late, believes that the saints – those who are believers – are still alive, and free to speak to us. Unsure what to do with that statement, we said our goodbyes, ended our conversation, and I dressed and prepared for the day.
Some quick research on the internet (the history buff in me wanted to know where to locate a few specific graves in what I knew to be a historic cemetery) and I headed out the door, praying the whole way, still stunned at what had suddenly risen to the surface in my early morning conversation. I'd quickly tucked a journal, bottle of water, my wallet and camera into a bag, and I was ready to go. I didn't know what to expect, or how the day would go, only that the Lord seemed to be drawing me to himself, and bringing to the surface long hidden wounds.
After arriving, I wandered through the cemetery for over an hour. Turns out that what is commonly referred to in our city as cemetery hill is actually composed of several separate cemeteries. I spent my time in Union Cemetery, and Burnsland Cemetery. I snapped photos, smiled at the wide variety of small animals that had seemingly turned out to greet me, and generally just enjoyed the peace of walking in a beautiful old cemetery – more like a park than anything. I located the graves of the RCMP Colonel who founded the fort that eventually grew into our city, naming the fort (and ultimately the city) after his hometown in Scotland, and of the first settler in the Calgary area as well. I visited the military burial grounds, walking through graves for soldiers killed in both world wars as well as the Korean war. I found the grave of a young woman, a rising local journalist, killed only months ago, in a brutal attack.
After walking for quite some time, I found myself wandering up a pathway
towards a building that I knew from my brief research to be the
old chapel and mortuary. I wondered what the orange ball lying in the pathway was, and as I drew closer and recognized the object I simultaneously began to laugh and cry. It was a bright orange giant marigold.
At this point I know you're all wondering why a large, ostentatious, and rather ugly flower inspired such a burst of emotion. My grandpa was known for his gardening skills. He'd built a few greenhouses in his backyard, and each winter started a bevy of plants from seed, that in the spring he'd then give to whatever family and friends cared to enjoy them. He was especially known for geraniums, tomatoes, and yes, marigolds. Each spring he'd bring my mom a huge flat of the giant marigolds – the sort that get a foot or two tall, and produce large, smelly, ant attracting flowers that are several inches in diameter, and are generally ostentatious and lacking in subtlety. Every year the front of our home was graced with these flowers, and every year my mom and I would have a conversation about how absolutely hideous I felt that these particular flowers were.
And so, finding one laying, completely out of place in the middle of a pathway, on a morning when I'd been grieving my grandfather, and had come to the cemetery hoping to lay to rest eight years of guilt and say goodbye, was a rather shocking experience for me. A quick perusal of the nearby area told me that there were no marigolds growing in the flower beds or on graves, and no flower arrangements that contained marigolds anywhere in the vicinity.
I picked the flower up, and, cradling it in my hand, began to hunt for a section of the cemetery that I'd been looking for all morning. It was time to say my goodbyes. Known as "The Potter's Field" (a reference to the field purchased by the priests, with the blood money Judas Iscariot had been paid for his betrayal of Jesus and ultimately returned to the priests, and designated by them as a cemetery for foreigners) this section of Union Cemetery houses approximately 1000 unmarked graves – the final resting place for the bodies of Calgary's earliest homeless, indigent, and a few executed criminals. Finding the spot, a narrow strip sandwiched between two sections with gravestones, and planted with large trees and shrubs, I climbed to the top of the hill and settled myself in the grass. Pulling out my journal I began to write, releasing the many years of emotion, and finally, addressing my grandpa in a letter of sorts, and saying goodbye.
The marigold now sits in a tiny glass of water on a bookshelf in my bedroom. It's wilting and fading, and within the next day or two I'll discard it. The memory it carries, though, will go with me forever.
On a day that I desperately needed release, to be freed from some things I'd carried far too long, Jesus met me in a cemetery. On a day when I'd spoken with a dear friend about saying goodbye, and she'd reminded me that the Lord would allow that to happen, I unexplainably found in my path the one flower that could open that well of emotion, and allow the release I'd longed for to occur. I said goodbye, and in that goodbye found great freedom. Freedom from guilt. From the silence that had marked this for so long in my life. From the grief that I'd carried unnecessarily past the time when the sorrow ended. I found life in a place known for death. And for that I am grateful.
